Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (8 page)

“Well, I’m stuck here overnight now.” Stella took a drag that burned her cigarette down to the filter. “It has to be after ten o’clock.”

Faith kept her back to the viewer and to Stella, her shoulders rising and falling gently with her even, unhurried breath. Stella was struck for what felt like the millionth time by the fact that she really knew nothing at all about Faith Keller—not where she lived, not who her people were, not if she had a family. There was an address on the job application Faith had filled out when she first came to work here, stuck away in a file someplace in the main office. It wasn’t a neighborhood Stella was familiar with or an address that brought up any associations, so it might as well have been nowhere at all. She knew Faith had been married and wasn’t married anymore. That had come up once, at lunch, but Faith hadn’t gone into details. Faith didn’t mind staying late or sleeping over. That had made Stella assume that Faith must live alone. If Faith had been working at Fountain of Youth for only a few months, this would not have been extraordinary. Come just after the first of the year, though, Faith would have been working here for exactly three years.

“Faith?” Stella said.

Faith didn’t seem to hear. Her head was bent over the mechanicals. Her shoulders were hunched under the red-and-white patterning of her holiday reindeer sweater. The sweater was cheap and a little frayed—bought at Sears, Stella thought, and kept forever.

“Faith,” Stella repeated. “I’m going to go down the hall to the bathroom for a minute. All right?”

“Go right ahead.” Faith sat up a little straighter, but she didn’t turn around. “There won’t be anything for you to do around here for a while. There won’t be any crises I can’t handle.”

Stella was about to say something stupid about how there wasn’t any crisis anywhere Faith couldn’t handle—the kind if idiotic, condescending thing men said to their secretaries, that Stella didn’t want to hear herself say at all—but she stood up instead and stretched a little to unkink her back.

“I’ll only be a minute,” she told Faith.

Faith didn’t answer her. Stella took one long last look at the other woman’s back and then left the office, leaving the door open just slightly to let the light spill into the hall. There were hall lights here, but almost nobody ever used them. The ceilings were high and the light fixtures were remote. The light bulbs Simon had the handymen put up there were too harsh, and cast the wrong kind of shadows.

The better of the two bathrooms up here was on the far end of the hall, near the back stairs. Stella always thought it must have been converted from an old-fashioned walk-in linen cupboard. She walked downstairs and let herself into the outer of the two small rooms without trouble, but when she tried the inner door it was locked. Stella leaned back against the counter with the two shell-shaped blue pastel sinks in it and called out: “Is somebody in there? If you want to take your time, I can go up the hall.”

There was the sound of a toilet flushing, harsh and swift: Simon’s infamous superplumbing. The inner door was unlocked and swung back. Stella found herself facing a tall young woman with blond hair wound into a chignon at the nape of her neck. The chignon had been braided first, the way it was done in sepia photographs from the days of the opening of the American West. Stella stood back and let the blond woman pass to the farther sink.

“I’m sorry,” the blond woman said. “I was taking forever. I’m so tired, I guess I’m not thinking straight.”

“You weren’t holding me up,” Stella said. “I just got here. I’m Stella Mortimer. I direct the videotapes and do the other film and production work that has to be done.”

“I’m Frannie Jay.”

“Step aerobics?”

“That’s right.”

“You don’t know how frantic they’ve been about finding someone to teach step aerobics for the tour. I don’t know why they didn’t think of asking the studios in California if they had anybody who would suit, but they didn’t. Simon’s always saying that we don’t think like an integrated corporation yet, and we’re just going to have to learn. Was it a great sacrifice for you, coming out here like this?”

“Sacrifice?” Frannie Jay blinked. “No, it wasn’t any sacrifice. I’m from New Haven originally. My mother lives out in West Haven with my aunt.”

“Ah,” Stella said. “You’ll be home for Christmas, then.”

“Christmas,” Frannie repeated. She looked at her face in the long mirror that covered the wall over both the sinks. “Yes, I suppose I will be,” she repeated. “I’m afraid I’m not very religious. I haven’t put a lot of effort into celebrating Christmas up to now.”

“Maybe it’s harder to celebrate Christmas in a place like California, where there isn’t any snow. Or were you in the north of California, where there is?”

“I was in Berkeley,” Frannie Jay said.

Stella had no idea where Berkeley was. She had only been out to California once, and that had been to Los Angeles. She hadn’t enjoyed the experience.

“Well,” she said, “I hope you like it out here. I don’t know much about this business, but I do know that it seems to be very difficult to find people who do what you do in the Northeast at this point, and I don’t like seeing Magda upset. And this really is a very nice place to work, even if New Haven isn’t a very exciting place to live in.”

I sound like a recruiting agent, Stella thought—but Frannie Jay didn’t seem to be paying much attention to her anyway. Frannie was bent over the sink, washing her face as well as her hands. Her skin was the dead white pale of someone who had just been very ill.

“Well,” Frannie said very politely, drying her face on one of the sky blue hand towels that hung on the little rack near the door. “It was nice to meet you. I think I have to go lie down for a while now.”

“You must be very tired,” Stella agreed.

Frannie turned away and walked out of the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Stella stayed where she was.

I wonder, Stella thought, why that young woman has been crying.

I
T WAS AN ARTICLE
of faith with all the people Greta Bellamy knew that spending your nights in bars was supposed to be fun. This was something Greta herself had believed all through high school and the two years she had spent at Southern Connecticut State College. She had at least been able to sit crammed into the corners of hardwood booths for hours without feeling either physically uncomfortable or terminally bored. Now Southern Connecticut State College had changed its name to Southern Connecticut State University, and Greta herself seemed to be going through a sea change. It’s because I’m turning thirty, Greta told herself sometimes, although she knew this couldn’t be true. Her best friend, Kathy Weddaby, was turning thirty, too, and Kathy was just as happy as she had always been to spend the hours after work investigating the relative merits of Molson Golden Ale and St. Pauli Girl light.

Tonight, they were all sitting together in a roadhouse called the Avalon—Greta, Kathy, Frank, and Chick. Frank was Kathy’s husband. Chick was Greta’s boyfriend, and had been, ever since they were all together in the class of ’83 at Hamden High. Chick would have been Greta’s husband, if she had let him, but every time Greta got started in that direction she pulled back at the last minute. She didn’t know what she wanted out of her life, but she did know that it wasn’t what Kathy had, or what Chick was able to give her, or what was on offer here at this roadhouse with its third-rate lounge acts bused in from the city and its fat old women in stockings and garters holding up the bar. The booth they were in tonight had a window looking out on the Housatonic River. If Greta craned her neck in just the right way, she could see a row of shuttered little shacks stretching out along the water and then the Stephenson Dam. Greta had a copy of
People
magazine open on the booth table in front of her. She couldn’t read the words because of the dimness of the light. She had a bottle of Heineken light on the booth table in front of her too, and a glass to pour it in, but she had been ignoring it so long the beer had gone flat. Frank and Chick were smoking Marlboros and blowing the smoke into the circle of light cast by the side light next to the booth. The lounge act consisted of four guys in white dinner jackets and bad skin who had once cut a record for Columbia and appeared on
The Andy Williams Show
. Some of the women at the bar seemed to remember them, and sang along whenever they played. Greta looked down at her magazine and studied the big picture of the heavyset, Middle Eastern-looking man that took up the left-hand page. He reminded her of the men who had belonged to the Shriner’s Club with her father; and he wouldn’t have interested her at all if it hadn’t been for the woman he was with. The woman was small and dark haired and very pretty, but what got to Greta was her attitude. Here is a woman who doesn’t take shit from anyone, Greta thought. The headline on the right-hand page, in very large type but still unreadable in this dark, said:

AMERICA’S MOST ECCENTRIC MASTER DETECTIVE PULLS OFF ANOTHER ONE

Chick was tired of blowing smoke into the light. He turned back to the table, saw Greta’s magazine, and snorted.

“Now she’s reading in bars,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

“It’s just
People
,” Greta said. “And I’m not reading. It’s too dark in here. I’m just looking at pictures.”

Kathy turned the magazine around so that it was right side up for her. “It’s that murder story again. Don’t you think that’s morbid?”

“You’re the one who bought everything there was to read about Amy Fisher,” Greta said.

“She bought everything there was to read about Lorena Bobbit, too,” Frank said. “Christ, I nearly took all the knives in the house and buried them in the backyard.”

“I think Lorena Bobbit was stupid,” Kathy said. “Saying her husband raped her and so she cut off his dick. If she wanted to cut off his dick, she should have just cut it off.”

“Well, she did,” Chick said. “That’s the point.”

“I liked the Amy Fisher thing much better,” Kathy said. “You could understand what was behind that one. Although I don’t think I’d do what Joey’s wife did. Go back to him like that, I mean. I don’t think I’d believe he had nothing to do with it.”

“I would,” Frank said. “I think that girl was just plain crazy.”

Greta took her magazine back from Kathy and turned it around so that she could see it again. The man’s name was Gregor Demarkian, but that wasn’t important. The woman’s name was Bennis Hannaford, and that was. Bennis Hannaford wrote novels about knights and ladies and dragons and magic trolls, and Greta had a copy of one of them—
The Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia
—hidden out of sight right now in her purse.

The lounge act started on a rendition of “Moon River,” not a very good one. The piano they were using was flat. Greta took a sip of beer right out to the bottle, made a face at the sour flatness of it, and put the bottle down again. When she looked up, she found Chick staring at her, and blushed.

“I let it go too long.” She felt slightly defensive.

Chick flicked his fingers at the beer bottle. “You’re letting everything go too long these days. You haven’t been paying any attention to business at all for months.”

“Oh, she’s been paying attention to business,” Kathy said sharply. “That’s how she got that promotion at work.”

“It wasn’t a promotion,” Greta said quickly. “It was just an upgrade in title. And a little raise.”

“Executive assistant.” Kathy made a rabbity little face. “Aren’t you important.”

“I’m being a secretary to Mr. Wilder just the way I’ve always done,” Greta said. “It’s just that I did a lot of overtime, and some extra work when we had all that trouble just after Thanksgiving—”

Chick lit another cigarette. He let the match burn down until the flame touched his thumb, but didn’t flinch. That was a macho thing all the boys had been into in high school. Chick had never given it up. He dumped the spent match in the ashtray in the center of the table. The ashtray was already overflowing with butts.

“I think that’s our point here,” he said seriously. “You aren’t paying any attention to me. You aren’t paying any attention to us.”

“It’s like you think you’re an entirely different person,” Kathy said, “It’s like you think all of a sudden you’ve gotten better than us.”

“Just because they’re giving you a little extra money at work doesn’t mean you’re better than us,” Chick said. “I mean, for Christ’s sake, Greta. It’s not like they made you president of the company. You’re just working for chump change and playing the lottery like everybody else.”

“She doesn’t play the lottery anymore,” Kathy said tightly. “She says she’s saving her money for something else.”

The lounge act had moved past “Moon River” and swung into a tinny version of “My Way.” Greta looked at her flat beer and wished she had drunk it. It would really help right now to be a little numb. Chick was right. She hadn’t been paying attention to him, to any of them. That was why she hadn’t picked up on this hostility before. And yet it must have been there. The raise was new—it wouldn’t even kick in until just before Christmas—but the other things, her preoccupation and, yes, that sense of difference, those had been here for months. Now the air was thick with anger turning slowly but inexorably toward hatred, and Greta felt a little sick. The four of them had been together for years now, ever since Greta and Chick had started going out in their high school freshman year. Greta didn’t have any other friends, even at work. She didn’t have any family left, either. Her parents had died in an accident on the Merritt Parkway more than five years ago. What would happen to her if Kathy and Chick and Frank stopped talking to her, and she was on her own?

She picked up her beer glass and put it down again. “I don’t see why I have to buy lottery tickets on a week when I’m feeling short of cash,” she said. “There’s Christmas coming up.”

“I use my Christmas bonus to pay for Christmas,” Kathy said.

“She’s saving up to pay her way into that health club.” Chick smiled. “Five hundred dollars, can you believe that? For this spa. For a week. Fountain of Youth, it’s called. Up in New Haven.”